Despite excesses, 'The Time Machine' cranks out an imaginative adventure

By WILLIAM ARNOLD, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

Updated 10:00 pm, Thursday, March 7, 2002

Photo: DREAMWORKS AND WARNER BROS.

Image 1of/1

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 1

A Columbia University professor (Guy Pearce) tries to regain his tragically lost love with the help of his time machine, traveling 800,000 years into the future from 1890s New York.

A Columbia University professor (Guy Pearce) tries to regain his tragically lost love with the help of his time machine, traveling 800,000 years into the future from 1890s New York.

Photo: DREAMWORKS AND WARNER BROS.

Despite excesses, 'The Time Machine' cranks out an imaginative adventure

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

With the nervous breakdown of its director, several postponed release dates and rampant rumors of script problems and last-minute retakes, the buzz on DreamWorks' lavish new film version of H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" has been fairly negative.

As it turns out, the film is not all that bad. It lacks the simplicity and charm of George Pal's Oscar-winning (for special effects) 1960 version, and may be a bit too overblown for its own good. But, for the most part, it's imaginatively staged and consistently entertaining.

The story is still set in the 1890s but the location has switched from London to New York City, and Wells' unnamed Time Traveler is now a Columbia University professor (Guy Pearce) who has a new motivation for inventing his time machine: to regain a tragically lost love.

But, after this setup, it's the same journey 800,000 years into the future, where mankind has subdivided into two opposite strains: the amiable Eloi, who live above ground; and the apelike Morlocks, who live below ground and prey on their kinder, gentler cousins.

Simon Wells (the great-grandson of the author), who directed most of the film but was replaced for the final few weeks by Gore Verbinski, has gone out of his way to give credit and pay tribute both to his famous ancestor, and to the much-loved Pal movie.

Latest Entertainment Videos

Thus, we see photos of H.G. on the hero's laboratory wall, Alan Young (who plays two characters in the 1960 version) makes a cameo, and, in the film's wittiest moment, a talking computer (Orlando Jones) plugs both the Pal movie and a (bogus) Andrew Lloyd Webber musical version.

On the other hand, the film drastically changes and complicates the original story line, and introduces a hugely unbelievable new character (Jeremy Irons), who stops the movie at one point to explain its premise for us, just in case we're too dumb to get it on our own.

Somehow, the timeless fascination of Wells' fable manages to shine through these excesses, and such incredulities as the fact that the hero's Eloi girlfriend (Samantha Mumba) speaks flawless 21st-century American with just a hint of an Irish lilt.

Overall, the special effects are impressive, especially the time machine itself (a monstrosity of Victorian gizmos that reputedly weighs 3 tons), one fast-forward montage of the 20th century passing before our eyes, and a bustling, computer-generated re-creation of 1899 Manhattan.

As the Time Traveler, Pearce is more eccentric and less macho than his predecessor, fellow Aussie Rod Taylor. But he makes a subtle, credible and pleasing transition of a somewhat geeky intellectual pressed by extraordinary circumstances into becoming a man of action.